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My assignment is to look at on-line publications as another journal. Let's start with the current on-line conference, ChemConf (http://www.inform.umd.edu:8080/EdRes/FacRes/ChemConference/ChemConf96/Home.html). The focus of the conference, New Initiatives in Chemical Education, is timely; the authors of the nine papers are adventuresome, the content is great, and perhaps most important, the organizers, Donald Rosenthal and Tom O'Haver, are highly qualified. ChemConf gives us a feeling of the breadth of the on-line publications - and the arguments about their future role. Where else would you get an in-depth discussion of the place for nonreviewed publications, put forth by the new editor of the nearly century-old Journal of Chemical Education: What Should a Chemical Education Journal Be in an Age of Electronic Information? by John W. Moore, Elizabeth A. Moore, Jon L. Holmes, Nancy S. Gettys, Mary Saecker, Carol Steinhart, Amanda Reinert, and Lin W. Morris (http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/ChemEduc/Meetings/ChemConf/Paper05.html).
For neophytes like myself, I can describe what is different about this journal.When you first open a print-based journal, you look at the table of contents, go to the articles of interest, read those articles and a few others that catch your eye, and then file the journal on the bookshelf. Another day you will pull out the journal and go to the same articles on the same pages. But with the Web, the table of contents is constantly changing. Articles themselves change; in fact, some will have disappeared.
But assuming that the article has been neither changed nor pulled, the table of contents is a special challenge. Bookmarks can be used for your favorite articles. This is fine, provided that you happen to have your own computer linked to the Web, and share it with no one - or you will find your bookmarks on organic reaction mechanisms movies from the University of Texas
(http://huckel.cm.utexas.edu/movies1.html) mixed up with the lovely Cezanne page
(http://www.Cezanne.com/)
of interest to the French teacher. So one of the first skills needed for this journal is bookmark management.
Let's go back to that page from UT and the movies - choose SN2 - but what is this? Sparkle is needed. So we go to Sparkle button and download. Now download the movie, open Sparkle, and then open the movie. And from Tom O'Haver (see his homepage for lots of goodies
(http://www.wam.umd.edu/~toh/toh/html) comes the hint that all looks much nicer if the movie is saved as a QuickTime file, and then opened with Sparkle. We want the flashy graphics and the moving molecules - but new skills/tools are needed for this on-line publication.
Another skill is self-reliance. What do we know about the quality of the on-line publications? Very little. Start with some feeling of confidence. Go to JCE: Online
(http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/)
for peer-reviewed sites. Go the new DivCHED page (http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/DivCHED/index.html). Query authors about their articles; engage other authors of similar articles in dialogue over obscure issues. Many times the peer review takes place after the publication. Again, check the credentials - if no author takes credit for the posting, bypass that article and go to another site.
To be well-informed about the state of chemical education, we should never depend on just one resource or journal. For many of us, Internet is a source of increasing importance in the field of chemical education.
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